Writer’s Corner has a good article on How to Find Interesting Words and Names for Your Fantasy Writing. The article covers the following points:
- Keep a small notebook of interesting names and words
- Maps are an excellent resource
- Dictionaries and encyclopedias
- Foreign languages
- Add a glossary to your novel
- Hearing the words
- Enhance your readers experience
Names of cities on old maps have been especially useful for me when writing my novel. To give place names a sense of authenticity, I’ve used old maps of England and France from the medieval period and simply tweaked them a bit.
I use modified versions of “period” names, and all the names I use were in use at the time I’m writing. However, I will absolutely not use older versions of place names, just to give the reader some sense of “authenticity”. It’s often hard, even with a glossary, for a modern reader to figure out the modern equivalents. This is one of the things that annoys me about Bernard Cornwell’s naming practices, and believe me, I’m pretty good at figuring out the modern equivalents. But there are always one or two place names I have to check. For me, this disrupts the flow of a story. And believe me, I will very quickly dump anything that interrupts the flow.
Anne G
Those old place names can be difficult. Bernard Cornwell does usually have a place name guide at the beginning of his books, so the reader will know the modern equivalent, but I don’t always want to flip back and forth.
Your comment on Cornwell’s use of old place names is one of the reasons why this practice annoys me.
Anne G
In one sense, I like the old place names because it does give the story more authenticity, but on the other hand — from a reading enjoyment perspective — it can become laborious.
Steven:
Yeah, I guess the old place names “feel good” if you value “authenticity” over authenticity. IOW if it’s “olde tymey” stuff you want, old place names are the way to go. Problem is, it’s a lot easier — though perhaps not on the writer, though definitely on the reader — to create authenticity in other ways. But that’s probably a lot more work, at least for some writers.
I’ve got a list of sites on my blog that might be useful for those trying to create realistic languages for their fantasy world, see:
http://marklord.info/2008/05/24/useful-world-building-websites/
Very cool. Thanks, Mark!